Practically every company on the planet sets out with the main objective of making money. This is usually done by manufacturing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging customers money for it. This fundamental theory is fairly straight-forward, though it contains many specific details.

First of all, it is a very rare case where a business can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be supplied by anybody else. This means that your enterprise will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar product and you will both be trying to earn money from the same shoppers, who only want to spend their cash once. So how can you increase the chances of them spending money with you?

Marketing is the main tool used by modern businesses to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. It is a very extensive topic that is influenced by a great deal of internal and external variables, but when done right it can be the one business practice that can make or break a corporation.

So where should you begin when creating a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every situation is different, and every business will have its own set of strengths and weak points that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing principle that can be applied to almost any corporation to be used as a marketing framework. It is known as the “Marketing Mix”.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a term that was first coined in the 1950′s and is a phrase that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a subtle balance of different elements of business functions. It got its name because it is similar to the ingredients checklist for a recipe.

The term was later built upon to include the idea of “four P’s” that described the essential elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very clear for company managers and marketers to swiftly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very rapidly create a personalised and effective marketing system. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Our organisation has grown to be a leader for providing turny seat products after employing tailored marketing concepts across our entire range of products.

Product

Whilst every aspect of the marketing mix is a requirement, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly the most crucial of all. It describes the physical product or intangible service that your business will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that customers are going to spend money with you.

Several people do not think that marketing has any place to play when it comes to the actual product that your business is selling. In fact, the typical train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around – your production department creates an item for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right? This is not always the case.

Take the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system and software application products in the marketplace already, and since the market is fairly well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”.

Rather than developing an operating system and then attempting to craft a marketing strategy to rival the likes of Microsoft and Apple, it would be far more effective to look at what sorts of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to manufacture and sell them. By being mindful of the marketing mix early on in your product development period you can prevent business dead-ends at a later stage.

Once your goods have been fashioned and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively review your own products to identify the reasons why a customer should buy your product rather than a competitors’. The technique is called product differentiation and forms one of the basic skills of the product part of the marketing mix cake.

Another form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is typically used to either prolong the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your brand new product attractive to as many customers as possible. Again, this method can be applied at all stages of product development.

The motor industry uses this technique very effectively by offering various engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they offer. They use the marketing mix to good effect to sell their own goods in an extremely competitive marketplace. Although these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same concepts can be applied to all businesses.

We do not have a distinct marketing division in our xbox 360 steering wheel and pedals service though many of our managers have been able to adopt marketing as part of their job function.

Price

Another key factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This is not a simple case of performing market research to figure out the top price that your customers would spend (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any particular targets your business has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly large!

Whilst it may seem obvious, it’s still worth noting that price has always been, and likely always will be, one of the key factors that shoppers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers do not always consider the cheapest price to be the best value. In fact a price that is too low can often turn buyers away.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing plan, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your rivals are doing and how can pricing maximise your own profits. From a strategy point of view though, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.

Price skimming

The main idea behind price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the sector of the market which is price-insensitive and will be prepared to spend a premium amount of money to receive a product or service early on.

This pricing technique is very often used in the consumer electronics industry where customers will often eagerly await the release of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Makers could set almost any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal core of customers that would pay it.

Penetration pricing

Penetration pricing is at the opposite end of the pricing spectrum, and is geared towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that monetary benefits can be earned long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when employed correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come.

Another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the only part of the marketing mix that will generate income for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to produce or undertake. So it is even more vital to get your pricing technique right.

To optimise our web site for search engine visibility we selected bean chairs and childrens bean bags for an aimed key phrase because it relates to our company and what we do.

Place

Place is the part of the marketing mix that is often overlooked by companies, but it is still a significant part of selling your product effectively. In short, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your customer, and consequently how you collect money from them.

The most common ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your products are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution network between your manufacturing plants and shops or other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to identify your own priorities and adjust your distribution network appropriately.

With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing techniques have had to consider how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as a whole distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a large pool of possible customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore yield impressive economic results.

Promotion

When you say the word “marketing”, many people immediately think of the promotional side of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is merely one branch of a more comprehensive system. Promotion can be used on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it may be an expensive undertaking it is often an essential one. The primary concern of promotion is to deliver a particular message that will boost sales.

Advertising is one of the most common forms of promotion. Classically it would be done by posting on billboards, producing short clips for TV and radio or by physically handing out flyers or leaflets to potential customers. With the arrival of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just as targeted advertising materials posted through your front door.

Another important part of promotion involves branding, which may not necessarily yield more sales directly, but goes back to one of the preliminary purposes of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your competitors. When all other pieces of the marketing mix are equal it can be branding that swings a customer’s choice.

Putting it into Practice

As previously mentioned each business is unique and will have different marketing requirements. By using a balance of the four P’s discussed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing plan.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!